Akari is the third album from Tokyo duo Illuha. Following 2011’s debut Shizuku (12k1067) and 2013’s Interstices (12k2028), Akari takes the next artistic step for the band. While Shizuku was recorded in the US and completed separately by the artists, Interstices captured the duo creating their exceptionally detailed music together live during a Japaneses tour. Akari, in turn, is the first studio album where Illuha recorded and mixed together, throughout the entire process. The beautiful st-robo studio in Tokyo put a collection of amazing equipment at their fingertips, from vintage mics and outboard gear to a vast collection of instruments, both acoustic and electronic. Their writing sessions were numerous and long with details meticulously obsessed over for nearly a year. The result is the most bewildering music Illuha have created to date. An album swimming with the most delicately tactile sounds and instrumentation that draws the listener in with hushed, motionless attention.

While Illuha’s Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date are often drawn to the most sparse notes of Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, acoustic grand piano and guitar, the breadth of instrumentation is partially what makes Akari so abosrbing. They have succeeded in creating their own universe of sound, so beautifully recorded, where each element not only has its own space but connects and interacts so fluidly with the other sounds. It is as if they are placed perfectly by nature, the compositions are fluid and organic, a far cry from anything calculated or structured. It is this open space that the music exists in which in turn defines the music itself. There is ample room to breathe within this forest of gentle tines, bubbling analogue synthesizers, clicking percussion and quiet field recordings. This is subtlety at its most refined; hushed without being saccharine, distant without being morose.

Akari is the Japanese word for light. Conceputally the duo used this word as a guide, as if they were searching through the dark, trying to keep the light alive, as if one is cradling a candle doing everything in their power to keep it alight in a storm. It is this almost visceral sense of sheltering, of protection, that gives Akari a very human and personal sound whose intensely deep focus is as impressive as it is arresting.

Akari

Structures Based on the Plasticity of Sphere Surface Tension

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Structures Based On The Plasticity Of Sphere Surface Tension

Excerpt from William Basinski's new CD release, Cascade. To be released on April 28th, 2015 on 2062. Distribution by Secretly Canadian Distribution. catalogue number 2062.1501
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Cascade Excerpt

Bells

She wasn’t just another stray practitioner skulking through the ruins. She was the quiet tyrant of Redwake Station, the one who bound its old experiments to her will instead of fleeing from them. The corridors still pulsed with that same sullen red light, the residue of whatever the researchers tore open decades ago, but now it beat in time with her.

Crimson power curled from her hands, not wild, not frantic, just obedient. Every trapped whisper in the station’s walls bent toward her. Every locked chamber stayed shut because she permitted it. Even the thing below, the one the station never truly understood, slept or stirred according to the tilt of her thoughts.

Stone groaned. Reality thinned. Whatever slept below stirred because she wanted it to.

She lifted her hands.

No alarms, no screams, no ghosts left wandering without her approval.

Redwake Station had become a single organism, and she was its pulse, its mind, its keeper.

The Void Remembers. 

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Redwake's Warden Part 2 - Eerie Sorceresses Chant Ambient [Sleep/Study/Relaxation]

Strands

steve hauschildt 'strands'

Cassette & Digital @ mysticroses.bandcamp.com

Soundscapes for the Emotional-Type Listener

Elegy for Elodie

from the forthcoming album 'tahoe' available 2/23

Tahoe

dedekind cut 'tahoe'

"Only Once Away My Son" by Brian Eno with Kevin Shields

Listen to this track and many others at adultswim.com/singles

Adult Swim Singles 2017

Brian Eno with Kevin Shields - Only Once Away My Son

Eighteen months on from his last new release, Vancouver-based singer / composer Ian William Craig returns with an (album-length) EP that collects together eleven new tracks. Entitled 'Thresholder', the record sees Craig return towards the smudged and scoured beauty of his 2016 opus, 'Centres'.

Recorded, produced and mastered by Ian William Craig himself, the origins of these tracks span a period from 'A Turn of Breath' to 'Centres'. Some were recorded at Ian's old studio on Vancouver's UBC campus, some at home, and one even recorded on tour in a giant secret underground cistern in Sweden. 

'Thresholder' will be released on 130701 on November 2nd.

Full info: http://130701.com/release/thresholder/

Thresholder

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Ian William Craig - And Therefore The Moonlight

"Reiterations" by First Tone from "Reactions" 2xLP/Digital due out October 2019.

"Reiterations" by First Tone

Watermusic II Excerpt

FatCat Records is a British independent record label founded in 1997.